Long time Apple watchdog, living in Malaysia, land of corruption. This blog discussed technology, gadgets and life in Malaysia.

Friday, April 14, 2006

Widescreen Gaming

Widescreen GamingAfter 6 hours of using the Dell widescreen LCD, I have been pretty happy with it. It was a different experience, both when playing games and when surfing/using Windows. The fact that I could be reading a blog and monitoring all my chat windows while checking my download status all at a glance AND running my email program on the old Sony so I could also keep an eye on it, was an exceptional experience.

The Dell widescreen LCD shipped with default brightness set to 50, out of 100. When I first plugged it into the PC and Windows started, I felt that 50 was too bright – my room is dimly lit, by design – so when I surfed the Internet for 2 hours, my eyes was strained. I proceeded to reduce the brightness to 15. Ahh.. much better…

However, the lower brightness level affected gaming. As usual, ZipD’s critical eye saw the washed-out textures. It was really due to 2 reasons: the low LCD brightness and the higher in-game video brightness (80% in the slider). This combo causes darker textures such as those of a huge boulder to looked washed out. Once I fixed this, the world of Tamriel came back alive in VIVID colour. However, quitting the game and going back to Windows to surf would create eye strain again.

It’s a catch 2-2 dilemma.

Luckily, there’s the nView profile provided by nVidia drivers to adjust brightness. I’m still playing with some of the settings but it looks promising.

Otherwise, it is something to get used to. My work tonight is to find the right balance in terms of brightness.